btilly

57 ms·

871.
by btilly 2y ago
You call it nitpicky. I call it a meaningless distinction. Dark matter is no more or less a theory than Darwin's Descent with Modification. Darwin's theory needed to be modified extensively to deal with genetics. And modified agai
872.
by btilly 2y ago
I see why some people would downvote him. However my expectations of HN are that, total, he shouldn't be downvoted for that comment. And indeed, he currently isn't. I'm glad his downvoting was temporary.
873.
by btilly 2y ago
To reduce math to models of objective reality, you need to say what a model is. To get Banach-Tarski you need to either accept Formalism - it is just a formal game whose concepts like uncountable sets do not "really" exist, or you
874.
by btilly 2y ago
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that it sucks. I see the people who can't accept that it is plausible as being the mirror image of people who object to calling it a fudge factor that makes our numbers work out. It really isn&#x
875.
by btilly 2y ago
Darwin's theory of evolution is descent with modification. It requires a method of inheritance, a method of random variation, and the observation that a variation which results in more descendants will grow exponentially relative to th
876.
by btilly 2y ago
On the one hand, I mostly agree with you. On the other hand, squint at pretty much any theory, and you can see a series of related theories. That are each the basic theory, plus another assumption or two about another thing that might be ob
877.
by btilly 2y ago
You are dismissing criticism lightly by accusing others of being conspiracy theorists, mocking you, and so on. These are classic ways of creating cognitive dissonance and shutting off alternate ideas. Which is the exact OPPOSITE of what Fey
878.
by btilly 2y ago
I see zero evidence for any of that. Science has a long history of proposals based on various fudge factors. Some of those fudge factors disappear when we get better measurements. Some require learning more about the system. For example New
879.
by btilly 2y ago
Actually I do have a plausible mechanism whose numbers have been sanity checked by a couple of cosmologists, but has never been published. Here's the idea. The expansion of the universe is currently accelerating. If this continues inde
880.
by btilly 2y ago
I don't know why this got downvoted. The top theory is exactly that - most of the mass in a galaxy is in the form of dark matter of some kind that can't fit our current theories of physics. The second top theory is that gravity be
881.
by btilly 2y ago
My first criticism is this. The scale on which quantization works is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant . We should not expect quantization to be a visible effect at the scale of stars. And if quantizatio
882.
by btilly 2y ago
No, epsilon-delta in the modern form was invented by Karl Weierstrass in 1861. Cauchy's approach was to define an infinitesmal as a sequence approaching 0, and then to use the old infinitesmal definition of a derivative. This almost wo
883.
by btilly 2y ago
If you go to Vegas, you can go to a wedding officiated by someone who looks like, sounds like, and acts like Elvis Presly. This is available to anyone. You can get the same actor to do the same simulation for another purpose if you're
884.
by btilly 2y ago
Let's take a parallel situation from around 20 years ago, and see how you feel about it. I'm going back that far as a reminder of what was long considered OK, before AI. In the movie The Seed of Chucky , Britney Spears gets kille
885.
by btilly 2y ago
In North America, traditionally Calculus is where you learn how to use the techniques to solve problems, and analysis is where you actually learn how to prove that it all is true. But I have to correct you on the history. Essentially none o
886.
by btilly 2y ago
No, not an exception. It is common for people to become contagious before symptoms. But contagiousness is not a binary on/off switch. As your virus load increases, you get others sick more easily. And the result is that most people con
887.
by btilly 2y ago
At the same age in southern California, my kids had what was supposed to be 1-2 hours of homework a night. Which was made worse by ADHD. And, additionally, I had to teach my son basic skills that school failed to teach him. Like spelling an
888.
by btilly 2y ago
Our? Where? My kids had far more than that.
889.
by btilly 2y ago
And what is the value of that homework for learning? Close to zero! A lot of the time it is done wrong, which just cements wrong ideas that need to be unlearned. It's only jobs are to be PR about how rigorous school is, and to hurt und
890.
by btilly 2y ago
It certainly was valid according to the original specs. I first saw it as an example over 20 years ago in a debate about whether XHTML should replace HTML 4.0.
891.
by btilly 2y ago
Not all of HTML can be represented with s-expressions. The following is perfectly valid. <b>Hello <i>World!</b> Greetings</i> Earthlings!
892.
by btilly 2y ago
I wish that the article was edited down to size. But the second half about how broken The Intercept is internally was fascinating.
893.
by btilly 2y ago
Unless the strategy is really bad, I'd prefer to go along with what everyone else does. When multiple people push their preferred optimum, the resulting inconsistency is clearly worse than a single suboptimal, but consistent, approach.
894.
by btilly 2y ago
My code may have been around somewhere. I suspect I'd done gc, in which case it wasn't. But my git skills then were certainly not as good as they are now. (I'd only recently switched from svn at that point.) I agree that the
895.
by btilly 2y ago
What went wrong was multiple teams on unsynchronized 2 week schedules, and a culture that said that we had to accept the force push when other teams released. So we released at the end of our cycle. It gets used for, if a vague memory serve
896.
by btilly 2y ago
One idiot with rebase destroys history with no trace. I worked with such an idiot in a parallel team. I can't say how many weeks of work randomly got destroyed by said idiot. I hate rebase on shared code I don't care how clean jt
897.
by btilly 2y ago
Consider the special case of a spherical deposit. You can find the center and mass of the deposit, but not its volume or density. But now that you know it is there, you can use other techniques, like seismic measurements, to nail that down.
898.
by btilly 2y ago
Is there any point in tattooing it on the back of the hands of people who don't read? That said, https://readabilityformulas.com/readability-scoring-system.p... is a good sanity check. Over half of people can't re
899.
by btilly 2y ago
Yes, inverse problems are hard. And not always possible in practice. See, for example, https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-1997... for a case where one isn't possible. That said, the gravi
900.
by btilly 3y ago
Yes, but a better clock means more precise measurements, means we can locate smaller masses to higher precision.

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